Dirty Santa and the Great Mystery

The way I see it there are three good gift types:
1. Something you need that you can’t afford. (Furniture; new car tires; stainless steel cookware; etc.)
2. Something frivolous you love that you would not likely buy for yourself. ($100 hurricane lamp; rabbit-lined leather gloves; 600-thread count Egyptian cotton sheets)
3. Something fun that suits your personality and interests. (a massage; tickets to a concert; a first-edition book)

This leads me to question the “Dirty Santa” game we play with my husband’s family each Christmas. The girls bring a girl gift, the guys bring a guy gift. The girl stuff ranges from spa gift cards to jewelry to chocolate. No problem there. It is the guy stuff that perplexes me. This year the gifts were as follows: Electrical tape; Duct tape; garden hose roll-up thingy; plastic rain gauge; wrench; box cutter; a dozen pairs of work gloves; and various colors of plastic cable ties. Seriously. And they grappled over these things like Hungry Hungry Hippos going after marbles.

Now, I gave this some thought. The girl gift equivalents would look something like: A travel sewing kit; box of safety pins; nail clippers; twelve pairs of yellow dishwashing gloves; spatula; a curling iron caddy; and an old lady clear-plastic rain bonnet.

Am I the only one who sees the humor in this? These are not gifts. These are the purchases of 5 men who do not have a clue how to shop and were equally relieved that none of the other guys knew how to shop either.

Gift cards make sense to me. Big boy toys I can appreciate. Electronic gadgets I understand. Game systems I even like myself. But plastic cable ties remain a mystery to me.

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2 thoughts on “Dirty Santa and the Great Mystery”

Plastic cable ties are magic fixers when you most need a magic tree. In fact, our bent-trunk Christmas tree is held up straight with one: Once around the base of the trunk, loop ’round the L screw in the stand, pull tight and, voila, straight tree.

Men are solvers. That’s why we keep asking, “What’s wrong?” when are angry or upset. We don’t understand that *fixing* you isn’t what you want, that you want the latitude to be angry, that is we fix it…what’s the point? It’s nearly impossible for a man to resist fixing things….Unless you ask us to fix something. Just like you want the latitude to be upset, we want the latitude to fix things when it feels right. Often it feels right *now*, like when the toilet is flooding the house. Just as often, though, we feel that now is *not* the time — in fact, *any* time you suggest is not the right time. We call this “nagging.” And nagging only results in a half-hearted fix — which is why we love cable ties. Nagging + Cableties = Football.